Although Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last year new mandates to force building owners to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a way to fight climate change, a Dallas-based architecture firm has taken the idea of sustainable design to the next level. During last month’s International... View full entry

During extreme storms, it's common for city infrastructure — from roads to subways to parking garages — to flood.

Architects from Danish firm Third Nature want to build garages that can cope with future storms. They designed a garage that could automatically move up and down as its water reservoir fills with and empties floodwater.
— Business Insider

Third Nature's conceptual garage structure, Pop-Up, consists of an underground water reservoir, five parking levels, and a pedestrian space on top. Most of this 30,460-square-foot structure could exist underground on dry days. On wet days, the structure would automatically pop up using hydraulics... View full entry

Hot on the heels of announcing a new initiative to build a miniature city on Mars, the Dubai government has unveiled the first successfully-tested Autonomous Aerial Vehicle (AAV)—aka a flying car. Apparently, they will begin operations as early as July.Manufactured by the Chinese company EHANG... View full entry

There’s a lot of talk these days about jobs—bringing them “back” and creating new ones. But, as Bloomberg reports, high labor costs incentivize corporations to automate. What’s more? Apparently robots are about to do what they did to US manufacturing in the developing world. According to... View full entry

Essentially people, all of us when we go to design something we often go out and do it and will make one or we’ll have three designs and…then we run out of time or money or patience and we say good enough. The computer doesn’t get bored in that same way. It doesn’t run out of time so you can literally test millions of versions and get a much better answer. So really what we are doing is automating the building of these prototypes.
— MarketPlace

After being diagnosed with ALS, a disease of the nervous system that gradually takes away motor control, breathing, and speech, 38-year-old landscape architect Steve Saling decided to invent a home that he could control with eye movements. As CNN.com explains:With a grant of $500,000 from Berman... View full entry

In a robot-​​proof edu­ca­tion, we have to focus on what humans do that robots cannot do: think cre­atively, work with others, think about ethics. For instance, sup­pose a sce­nario where a self-​​driving car can either hit three people and hurt the pas­sen­gers, or save the pas­sen­gers but hit 10 people. What is it going to do? Who’s going to pro­gram that? Who’s going to decide? You.
— North­eastern Pres­i­dent Joseph E. Aoun

In a Q&A between Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun and George Thrush, founding director of the School of Architecture, the two educators touched on the implications of automation for architectural education, among other things. "Cre­ative thinking and inno­va­tion... View full entry

Imagine driving into London not on surface streets, but rather in an underground tube with automated, moving tracks designed specifically for electric cars. Like a kind of subterranean track-laden ferry, which drivers would be able to individually join and exit at numerous points, this "CarTube"... View full entry

“No lines. No checkouts. No registers. Welcome to Amazon Go.” The newest “disruption” offered by Silicon Valley promises to radically shake up retail design in the name, per usual, of increased efficiency. Located in Seattle, the Amazon Go store is a market without cashiers. Instead... View full entry

There is a misleading myth that “architecture is just architecture”, that assumes that architecture is a form of knowledge that neither research definitions, nor processes applied in other disciplines, can be applied to architecture research. It is a myth that has been used enduringly as an... View full entry

Driverless cars will trundle around the UK in their first public trials today.

The demonstration of the autonomous electric vehicles is going to take place on the pavements of Milton Keynes.

These tests will be the culmination of an 18-month research project which involved virtually mapping the town and updating regulations for driverless vehicles.
— Sky.com

For the latest on advances in self-driving cars:Uber lets you hail its self-driving cars in Pittsburgh later this monthHow autonomous vehicles will accelerate suburban sprawlThis startup hopes to bring autonomous campus shuttles to colleges by 2017 View full entry

If you're a designer who works with clients, here's something you're probably familiar with: the project that never ends. The actual designing may take a matter of hours, but presenting the idea to a client, making little tweaks and edits, finding a middle ground between your vision and theirs? That process can take months [...]

For his graduate project, Ingemann Breitenstein spent time in product design studios across London researching the inefficiencies in that designer-client process.
— Fast Co.Design

"The result is an algorithm that takes a basic idea for a product and generates countless variations on its design—as directed by a physical controller. Ingemann Breitenstein calls the machine the Unpaid Intern—a tongue-and-cheek nod to the mindless photoshopping and last... View full entry

Copycat attacks sprang up around the world: trains going haywire in Japan; smart thermostats freezing pipes in Minneapolis; Chinese hackers noodling around a water utility in San Francisco. Americans suddenly realized that, although they had spent plenty of time anguishing about how to protect the country’s physical borders, with every device they bought, they had been letting more and more invaders into their cities, their homes, and their lives.
— New York Magazine

"They had moved everything they did online, thinking they were moving into the future; they woke up the morning after thinking they’d moved into a war zone instead."This is a great work of speculative fiction that imagines a cyberattack that brings down New York City in the near-future... View full entry

[nuTonomy's] Level 4 autonomous vehicle "is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip;" all you have to do is provide a destination and (possibly) open and shut the doors.

Google's autonomous cars, in contrast, are currently at Level 3, with limited self-driving automation [...]

[nuTonomy] is building into [its] decision-making engine the ability for cars to actually violate the rules of the road when it's necessary to do so
— spectrum.ieee.org